This picture of Rick Santorum comes courtesy of Raw Story. When all other indicators of journalistic neutrality are erased, photo selection will tell us what we need to know.

Speaking last week on something called Today’s Issues, Rick Santorum told Tony Perkins—yup—that single mothers are the base of the Democratic Party. “Look at the political base of the Democratic Party: it is single mothers who run a household,” Santorum said. “Why? Because it’s so tough economically that they look to the government for help, and therefore they’re going to vote. So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two parent families, you eliminate that desire for government.” First of all, please note that an earlier version of the Right Wing Watch article transcribed Santorum’s remark as “reduce the Democratic appendage,” which was incorrect. Second, if Rick Santorum isn’t careful, his opportunistic political calculations might coincide with human compassion. Video after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMTv9-v-nQ

It’s much better when you can hear his tone of indignant disbelief. Let’s set aside the possibly not-researched statement that single mothers are the primary constituents of the Democratic Party. I’m more interested in Santorum’s chain of reasoning, which begins from the following premises:

1) It’s really hard, economically, to be a single mother in charge of a household.

2) People who are in really hard economic situations want help from the government.

Interestingly, Santorum follows this last statement with “and therefore they’re going to vote.” The bad outcome is not “and therefore they’re going to vote for welfare;” it’s that people are participating in the democratic process at all. Santorum believes that part of this problem with the whole Democrats thing is all the voting, but whatever. That’s not his conclusion. His conclusion is:

3) We therefore must reduce the number of people in hard economic situations in order to reduce the Democratic advantage/appendage.

Like the paraphrase, the italics are mine. It’s mind-boggling, though, that Santorum thinks this way. For a man who has based his entire political career on moral authority, he seems to have completely missed the moral argument in favor of helping single mothers. It’s not just that the Bible commands us to get/be/stay married; it’s also that human compassion is a biological and ethical imperative single moms vote Democrat. As the former congressman and Republican presidential candidate puts it, we need to “eliminate that desire for government.”

Replace that phrase with “eliminate that need for help from an outside force,” and you’ve got Democratic social policy since Bill Clinton. In the long argument over whether society should be mean to single moms, we seem to have reached agreement that being one is super hard. According to the Democratic argument, that’s why having a bunch of single mothers is bad. It means you have a bunch of poor people. We need to fix that because then fewer people will be poor. According to Santorum’s argument, having a bunch of single mothers is bad because being a single mother—or perhaps just becoming one, but maybe even having a bunch of them around—is morally wrong. We need to fix that, because single mothers vote Democrat.

Both these chains of reasoning come to the same conclusion. It’s worth noting where the moral claim appears in each one, though. The Democratic version starts with expedience—it’s bad to have a bunch of single moms because it’s economically hard—and saves the moral claim for the end. We should help single mothers because [implied] it’s morally right to help poor people. Santorum’s version, by contrast, starts with the moral claim and ends in expedience.

Note that the moral claim is justified in neither argument. That’s how moral authority works: you either believe that it’s wrong to have a child out of wedlock or you don’t. You either believe that society is obliged to help the unfortunate or you don’t. The difference is that the Democratic version argues from expedience to arrive at the unjustified claim that we should help people, whereas the Santorum version begins with the unjustified claim and arrives at the expedient conclusion that, you know, screw Democrats.

Santorum’s reasoning in this case can lead us to a lot of conclusions he would probably disagree with. For example: single mothers vote Democrat, so we can reduce the number of Democratic voters by making it easier to get an abortion. Or: single mothers vote Democrat, so we can reduce the size of the Democratic base by abandoning the parent-child system and putting kids in luxurious orphanages. It turns out that you can work Santorum’s logic backwards and violate any number of his moral principles. It’s almost as if Rick Santorum’s sense of decency had no bearing on his political behavior at all.

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